Cynthia in Union Square.

This is a picture of San Francisco as we are leaving on the ship.

This is Cynthia on the ship just after we went under the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see the bridge behind her.

Here is the view from the balcony in our room on the ship.

This was a belly flop contest on the ship. I got this picture as the guy was hitting the water.

Cynthia and her sister Patty by the pool.

By the pool again.

Here's Patty and her mom dancing in the pool.

Here I am on a catamaran ride to Las Caletas. This is a private island tour that was pretty fun. They have lunch on this private island that is really beautiful. The only negative is that we get stung by jellyfish every time we snorkel there.

Cynthia on the Las Caletas catamaran.

When I looked up I saw this and thought it was an interesting picture.

This is a parrot on Las Caletas.

This is where we ate lunch.

This is the cooking demonstration on the island. The food was great.

This is part of the entertainment on the way back. These guys are pretty good at putting on a show on this trip. If you are ever in Puerto Vallarta this is the Las Caletas trip through Vallarta Adventures. It's worth doing. Watch out for the jellyfish though.

Formal dinner night on the ship.

Cynthia's brother Mike.

Here are some pictures of Cabo San Lucas. This was our favorite place of all of our stops.

I'll be singing at a church in Leavenworth this weekend for Easter. I don't know the name of it but they tell me “it's the only church in Plain.”

It's our 12 year wedding anniversary this weekend as well. We will be staying in a bed and breakfast. It should be lots of fun.

I will be playing guitar and doing some singing at Eastside Foursquare Church in Bothell, Washington this weekend for all of the services.

Here is all of the info:

Service Times
Saturday, 6:00pm
Sunday, 9:00 & 11:00am   

Location
14520 100th Ave. NE
Bothell, WA 98011

(Directions on link below)

Phone
425.488.2500

http://www.eastsidechurch.org/about/campus.asp

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas. In this day and age it seems to be relatively difficult to take time to enjoy family and friends in a peaceful fashion. I wish for you all that you would cherish these times together. God bless you.

Byron

We haven't seen the sun here in the Seattle area in what seems like several weeks. It's been dark and rainy every day. Today there is blue sky and sun. Very nice!

I'm heading to Promise Keepers in Seattle this weekend. It's being held at Safeco Field. This will be the first time I've ever been to the baseball stadium that I've been contributing to with my taxes for the last several years.

I'll try to take some pictures and write a little about my experience there. It should be a good time. I've been to several of the Promise Keepers events over the years. Last year I drove down to Portland, Oregon to attend.

I've been kind of slow in adding entries to this blog in the past week. Commenting isn't working right now and I think it's kind of lame to add entries that people can't comment on. I should be able to look at the issue this coming week and get it fixed.

Watch the disturbing video by clicking here.

Read the transcript of the video by clicking here.

Yesterday on my way home from work I actually saw someone driving a Pacer. It was so interesting I couldn't stop looking at it. I was amazed that it was still running. I don't think I've seen a Pacer in over 10 years.

For those of you who do not know what a Pacer is, here is an interesting link.

I spent three hours in a $40,000,000 (yes that's forty million dollars) last night. This was truly a once in a lifetime experience. The home is 22,779 square feet. Everywhere you turn in this home you are looking at some magnificent (and VERY expensive) piece of art. These people are personal friends of Dale Chihuly so there are an amazing number of beautiful glass pieces throughout the home, including the mammoth chandelier in the front entryway. I could write about this home for hours. We thought we would only be there for an hour and a half. We found that even in three hours you could really only get a glimpse of what the home is like. Take a look at the pictures below and realize that pictures do not do this home justice. You really have to be there to experience the magnificence.

Below you are greeted in the entryway by the Chihuly chandelier. Most of the flooring that you see was brought in from Africa.

This is the entryway to the family room. It's also an art gallery of sorts.

Below is a picture of the patio outside the family room. What you don't see is that the patio is really very huge and has a full waterfront view of Lake Washington and partial views of downtown Seattle. We had the most amazing sunset last night as we watched the city lights begin to glow amongst the backdrop of the golden sky.

This is a hand made fireplace that is anchored in the wall in such a way that even an earthquake couldn't remove it.

This is the dining room. It has an amazing view and that is real pressed gold in the ceiling.

Huge living room below the entryway.

One of two wine cellars with an amazing collection of wines from around the world. These people actually hold wine auctions to raise money for charity.

This is one of the many luxurious powder rooms. This one has solid gold (yes, real gold) sinks.

This lap pool is as amazing as it looks. In fact it's even more amazing. Those are hand painted Egyptian columns and the pool is filled with imported salt water.

This is the master bedroom. Again the picture does not do it justice. This room has one of the most amazing views I have ever seen.

Master bathroom with the tub in the center of the room.

Halfway from the home to the water there is a fully stocked trout pond. All of the landscaping is incredible. The home has a 7 person staff that maintains the home full time including a house manager and personal chef.

This is the view from the patio that I mentioned earlier. The dock that you see below holds their 130 foot yacht.

Columns flown in from Africa.

This is the entryway if you are looking out the front door. When we left it was dark and the lighting was so perfect we felt like we were at a resort in Hawaii. One of the things that we noticed about the property was that every single thing both inside and out was meticulously brought to perfection.

This is the outdoor pool. This whole area is incredible.

Hey if you would like to buy this home give my wife Cynthia a call.

206.478.7900

Or click here for more info.

<RANT>

If I have to read the letters IMHO in an email one more time I think I am going to scream. For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know what I am talking about, this is a rapidly growing trend in modern email communications. People are too lazy to actually type the words “in my humble opinion” so they throw some meaningless acronym in there as a substitute. I see this being used on a lot of large distribution lists at work and I know that there are probably many people that have no idea what the acronym actually means.

The thing that's particularly annoying about most of these is that they are meaningless even when they aren't reduced to an acronym. Why does someone even need to say “in my humble opinion?” We know it's your opinion because you are the one writing it. Just write your opinion and be done with it already. Chances are you aren't even all that humble about it since you chose to send it to hundreds of people.

The event that got me thinking about this happened the other day. I was reading someone's email that was posted to a large distribution group and he used the acronym FWIW not once but twice in the same email. I sat there for about 5 minutes trying to figure out what FWIW meant. Even in the context of the email I still wasn't getting it. So I went to the Acronym Lookup Tool hosted on our company Intranet (some team actually spent time and money developing a technology to help people understand these things if that tells you how bad the abuse has become) and I found out that it means “for what it's worth.” Again, a meaningless statement even when expanded to proper English.

</RANT> 

If you are new to this site, you should know that it has actually been around since 1998. It used to be solely dedicated to presenting my music ministry, and I thought I would get into the swing of this new century and convert it into a web log (blog). You can see the images of its former self at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

This blog runs on the dasBlog engine created by newtelligence. If you have any questions about blogging or how to set one up please feel free to comment below or email me.

Look forward to many subjects being discussed here from food to music to politics.

God bless you, and enjoy your visit.

Byron